Starbucks managers are standing in the way of making things better for workers

Store managers are given tight labor budgets and incentivized to understaff stores, which makes it difficult to staff workers on regular schedules, according to the Times report.Business Insider | September 24, 2015, 14:30 IST

Store managers are given tight labor budgets and incentivized to understaff stores, which makes it difficult to staff workers on regular schedules, according to the Times report.

By Hayley Peterson

Starbucks has vowed to improve working conditions for its baristas, following employee complaints about long, grueling shifts and erratic schedules that are planned only one week in advance.

But things have been slow to change, and many Starbucks store managers are to blame, the New York Times reports.

Store managers are given tight labor budgets and incentivized to understaff stores, which makes it difficult to staff workers on regular schedules, according to the Times report.

"The mood lately has not been superpositive; they've been cutting labor pretty drastically," Matthew Haskins, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Seattle, told the Times. "There are many days when we find ourselves incredibly - not even a skeletal staff, just short-staffed."

Another barista, Ciara Moran, told the Times that the Starbucks in Connecticut where she worked until recently is suffering from a "severe understaffing problem," largely due to the fact that it had no assistant manager to deal with employee complaints.

As a result, complaints were typically brought to the store manager, who had "too much on her plate" to find a resolution, Moran told the newspaper.

A third barista who works at a Starbucks in Georgia told the Times that so-called "clopenings" - where an employee has to close a store late at night and return the next morning to open it - have happened at her store because the manager trusts only a few employees to handle closings.

Starbucks didn't respond to a request for comment on this story.

A spokeswoman for the coffee chain told the Times that all baristas now get their schedules 10 days in advance.

"We're the first to admit we have work to do. ... But we feel like we've made good progress, and that doesn't align with what we're seeing," she said.